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| One of three baskets of slowly ripening pears |
“What’s that?” The Husband was racing from window to window,
kinda shouting. I put down whatever I was doing – still garden-related chores –
and peered out the kitchen door with him. A giant, white, bus-like vehicle
pulling a fairly large car behind it had come down our driveway and was making
itself comfortable under the pines and maples on the pond edge of the driveway.
Our driveway, you understand, is unusually long, and for all
the warmish months of the year you can’t see the house from the road for the
trees. It’s not uncommon for strangers to mistake our driveway for a gravel road,
get part-way down it, realize their mistake, and back out rapidly. Not all
drivers are capable of backing that far and also making the slight up-hill
curve. The driveway crosses a field, people: much easier to turn around to
leave. Our “lawn” isn’t really lawn.
But this giant white thing was, literally, settling down and
making itself comfortable. Watching this, all I could think was to wonder what
old rock and roller from The Husband’s past managed to locate him and was making
a surprise visit in a white big thing.
The windows had their shutters down, and I couldn’t see clearly in through
the giant, tinted front window; and the thing was wiggling down and sighing,
much like an old dog does when it’s making itself comfortable for a nap. “Leveling”
itself, I found out later. The Husband was right there at its door, waiting for
it to open.
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| Winter squashes |
Which eventually it did and The Husband bounded in. I was a
little more hesitant, but decided to climb the stairs into the thing – and
there in the driver’s seat was the Southern Gent.
“Who else would arrive unannounced at suppertime?” the
Southern Gent beamed.
“Okay then,” I answered. “I’ll go back inside and alter what
I’d started to make for supper!”
But first we had to explore the SG’s rolling home. I’d never
been inside an RV before, and this one was big – almost the size of a bus. It
was fascinating, and not so different from the tiny houses that are so popular,
but this thing seemed like it’s probably bigger than the photos I’ve seen of
tiny houses. But I’ve never been in one of those, either, so what do I know?
What I know for sure is that this big tiny house is several times the size of
the camper the Actress and the Inventor haul around with them to live in on
their cold-weather sojourns down south.
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| Pumpkins stored in the bulkhead |
The Southern Gent is originally from North Carolina, and has
lived lots of places and done lots of things, including building boats,
farming, building furniture, doing art, and currently, working for a German
manufacturer of farm equipment - thus the traveling house so he can be more
comfortably situated as he travels the country visiting farms. We met him
decades ago; he’d met the Gypsy when they were both living in Florida, and he
left Florida and moved north not long after she did. He came for a visit and
stayed for many years. It’s been several years since we’ve seen him, and his
current job has taken him across our country, into Canada, and to Germany,
Italy, and other places in Europe. We’re almost jealous. It was good to see
him, and to hear his latest travel tales.
Old friends are as comfortable as a long-loved and lived-in
sweater; no matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen them, they nestle right
in, fitting exactly right, and the conversations continue from where they ended
last.
I was also glad to see the Southern Gent because it’s been
years – since I was a kid – since I grew pumpkins, and I wasn’t sure when I
should pick them and if they needed hardening off. I was pretty sure the
Southern Gent would have an opinion, and he did. So I picked ‘em, and put ‘em
up on the back wart for a few days before humping them into the bulkhead with The
Husband’s help.
We got a wicked frost just a day or two later, which killed
everything but the asparagus fronds, the fava beans, and the flowers on the
inside side of the back fence, so the timing was perfect. There are nine – yes,
9 – French pumpkins, and I think I’ll need to cook them up and freeze the
pureed insides, as there’s no way I’ll get to the ninth pumpkin before rot sets
in if I just leave them for using as I need them. We’ll have a pumpkin-roasting
weekend sometime soon.
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| My giant coral Love Lies Bleeding found a home at the cafe! |
I also picked all the pears I could reach out of the pear
tree, dreading to lose them to a freeze. They like to be cold before they
ripen, but freezing is another matter; and if I leave them ‘til they fall, most
of them are damaged on the way down. I stood on a couple of piled-up bags of
cedar mulch, which let me reach a bunch, then went and fetched the kitchen
stepstool, which let me reach more, but there are still about 5 I just can’t
reach and will have to get the Tall Dude to pick for me. There are now three
baskets of unripe pears on the kitchen counters, along with a basket of slowly
ripening plum tomatoes, three baskets of green tomatoes on the diningroom
table, and another basket full of cherry tomatoes.
Tomatoes ripen from the inside out, and once they’ve started
the process, don’t need sunlight to finish it. In fact, putting a picked
ripening tomato in the sun is apt to turn it mealy; it’s better to ripen them
out of direct light. The ones that have gotten shiny will ripen; the ones that
haven’t yet turned shiny will not.
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| Pasta sauce in progress; yellow paste tomatoes |
One year, when we lived in Maine, we had
tomatoes ripening on newspapers in the upstairs hall until well after
Thanksgiving. They don’t taste as good as vine-ripened tomatoes, but they’re
slightly better than the tomatoes you buy in the store, which are also picked
unripe for ease in shipping (green tomatoes are hard) and ripened artificially
with gases. Also, one can make green tomato piccalilli, green tomato pickles,
and fried green tomatoes with the bounty you picked to save them from frost. As
you cut into green tomatoes, you’ll see that some are pink on the inside, and
in some you’ll find that the seeds have started to sprout. This time of year,
everything rushes to ready itself to reproduce before winter cold kills it off.
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| One of several baskets of ripening tomatoes |
My compost bins are full to overflowing, and I still have spent
plants to uproot and pile in. The birds are busy eating from the sunflowers;
and the fall raspberries are still producing a small crop of very sweet fruit,
which we battle the hornets and yellow jackets for. The Egyptian onion bed is
green and lush. Soon I’ll be planting garlic, and if the perennials I ordered
don’t arrive in the next few days, I’ll be on-line doing battle with those
companies, which are determined I live in zone 5 and don’t need to plant until
November. Most likely, in a snowstorm. Someone at the USDA was smoking wacky
weed when they re-zoned the country. The gov’t doesn’t believe in a warming
climate except when it talks about planting zones, apparently, and they’re
ahead of themselves there – at least, in my cold neck of the woods.
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| Picked before frost bouquets! |
The Southern Gent left on his travels three days after he
arrived, leaving me with good advice and a nasty cold to remember him by! Safe
travels, SG, until you appear again!
For the blog:
herondragonwrites.blogspot.com 11
October 2019 All photos Deb Marshall
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| Part of the harvest of 37 peppers!! |
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